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Only the front of the oven nearest the door, and about an inch from each side wall, cooked a little cooler—about 20 degrees cooler. This is still an impressive result, especially compared to turntable models that don’t even let you use most of the space in your microwave.
Just note that with the sensor cook, you can’t cover your food and get the same results. It will interfere with how the microwave senses temperature; i.e., resist the temptation to cover your food unless you’re using the basic timed-cook functions, which also exist. I did in fact manage to nuke an egg this way without it exploding all over the oven, but the cautious might still cover their egg and cook in controlled time increments.
The other Achilles heel for the oven’s temperature sensors is a multi-layered bowl of food. When I reheated a Korean rice bowl layering short ribs atop cabbage and rice, the cabbage did not cook as hot as the meat or the rice, and I had to mix it in a little and reheat. This is, of course, what I’d expect to happen in nearly every other microwave. But it’s worth noting that this oven only feels magical on flat platters.
Functions and More Functions
Simplicity is the key to this microwave, and it’s why I like it: I don’t have to watch it or worry about it. With few exceptions, the oven’s main sensor reheat function will heat my food reliably and evenly to 180 degrees Fahrenheit (or less if I set the heat to any of five lower settings). I am willing to cede this as genius.
But the other main functions also mostly work pretty well. The Beverage button will heat a mug of whatever liquid to about 170 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest I’d want my coffee or tea. Defrost was able to de-ice a frozen chicken breast in 10 minutes, while barely warming any part of the meat beyond room temperature. (I also needed to rest the chicken breast five minutes, per instructions, to let the heat even out.)
The popcorn setting is essentially a timer, since the infrared sensors can’t see through a popcorn bag: Set the weight of your microwave popcorn bag, then let it go. With a bag from Kroger, my results were perfectly acceptable: no burnt popcorn, and a few dozen unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. Trying to follow the popcorn maker’s instructions, waiting till there were multiple seconds between pops on a high-powered microwave, was dang near a fire hazard. I’ll take the Popcorn button.
Classic timed microwave cooks are available, and so is upping or lowering the microwave’s power manually. Somewhat idiosyncratically for the American market, Panasonic also added a battery of preprogrammed microwave scratch-cooking recipes, whether one-bowl chicken noodle soup or spaghetti Bolognese with the meat cooked from raw. Scratch microwave cooking is more common in Japan, where kitchens are small—and ostensibly, these functions also showcase the microwave’s ability to modulate its power settings for precise cooks. But the microwave recipes still felt like a time capsule from the 1980s.
